My Life in Dioramas

by Tara Altebrando

  My mom came in a while later, just as I was prepping my second shoebox. She stood quietly behind my chair for a minute. She looked for a second like she was going to cry or say something like “It’s beautiful” or “I’m so sorry about all this,” but then she just said, “Time for bed.”

  “But I didn’t do the second one yet.”

  “Kate, it’s late.”

  I was tired—bone tired—so I didn’t argue any more. I just went upstairs to brush my teeth and put pajamas on. I set my alarm early for the morning so I could get up and make a second diorama.

  Then I pulled out the dance troupe forms.

  I grabbed a pen and filled out the registration form, then counted out some money I had stashed in my drawer from my last birthday and put it in an envelope with the form.

  I sat staring at the parental permission slip a good long while.

  I picked up a pen.

  Just as I was about to forge my mom’s signature, I paused.

  I had to at least try to talk my parents into it.

  I put it all in my dance bag and zipped it up.

  Climbing into bed, I looked out the window. The sky looked like a piece of black construction paper that someone had attacked with a tiny hole punch—so many stars.

  Maybe tomorrow I’d make a diorama of me, asleep in this room.

  Not for Mrs. Nagano, but just for me.

  June fourteenth we could move.

  Not a day before.

  I drifted off trying to think of ways to make the house smell bad.

  5.

  Mrs. Nagano was acting pretty unimpressed on Friday—“Just put them with the others, Kate”—but I could tell from the hint of a smile on her lips that she was pleased I’d followed through. I’d managed to put the diorama of me on the scooter together over breakfast and a little bit on the bus, and also in homeroom. The worst grade she could really give me would be a 90. I mostly got 100s on the tests in her class so my final grade wouldn’t be too bad.

  Just yesterday I’d been thinking I wouldn’t be around long enough to fail, but I had changed my thinking entirely.

  I was going to stay.

  With Dance Nation in the mix, I had to.

  We were moving on to a new social studies unit, something about family life in different parts of the world, and I studied the pictures in our textbook, of whole families sleeping on the floors of huts, of villages near rivers in countries I’d never heard of. Here I was, mad about the possibility of living with two measly grandparents, whose house was actually pretty nice, when there were people in the world sleeping on floors. I wasn’t sure whether that made me a bad person or not.

  I turned to a blank sheet in my notebook and wrote a note, then poked Naveen in the arm and passed it to him when Mrs. Nagano wasn’t looking. It read, Stuff that can make a house smell bad. Go.

  I’d made a blank numbered list, one through five.

  Naveen was all poker-face. He totally looked like he was taking notes on whatever it was Mrs. Nagano was saying when he wrote something on the sheet in reply. I held out my hand but he kept on writing and writing and pausing in between. It was actually sort of annoying how long he was taking. But finally, he folded the page, and when Mrs. Nagano turned to the board again, he handed it back across the aisle.

  I opened it and read:

  1. Fecal matter

  2. Spoiled food

  3. Dead animals

  4. Mildew

  5. Cigarettes

  Have I mentioned how awesome Naveen is?

  I looked over at him and he looked at me and I mouthed the word, “Thanks.”

  “What are you plotting, Kate?” Naveen asked me on the way out of the room after class.

  I looked around to make sure no one around us would be bothered listening to us.

  “Please don’t tell anybody,” I said, “but my parents are trying to sell our house and I’m trying to stop them or at least slow things down. Significantly. There’s an open house this weekend.”

  He seemed to be thinking hard for a second, his eyes looking up and away at a point high on the wall. “On such short notice, I’m thinking fecal.”

  “Gross.”

  “You have Angus and Pants. And your neighbor’s cows? The ones you’re always complaining about, with the mooing and all.” He seemed mildly irritated but also amused. “I wasn’t suggesting you . . . you know.” He nodded toward the door of the girls’ bathroom.

  I was probably blushing. “Of course not.”

  “By the way,” he said. “I liked your scooter diorama a lot. You have a way with aluminum foil.”

  “Thanks.”

  He winced a little and scratched his neck. “They’re really selling Big Red?”

  “Trying to,” I said.

  Naveen shook his head. “Where are you moving to?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t know.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yeah.” I was not going to get emotional. “Anyway, like I said, I’m just going to try to . . . delay things a bit. Dance Nation is in June. If I make it to then, I’ll be happy. I mean, not happy, but you know, I’ll deal.”

  He scrunched up his face. “What’s Dance Nation?”

  “Oh, at dancing school. We’re competing as a troupe for the first time. It’s going to be amazing. We’ve been asking to do it for years. I seriously can’t believe it’s happening.”

  “Ah,” Naveen said. “So that’s why you want to stay so badly? Here I was thinking it was because of, you know, me.”

  “That, too,” I said, and nudged him with my elbow. Then we were off to our next class, where I sat right near Stella.

  “Naveen’s a genius,” I said.

  She was drawing swirly doodles on the back of a folder. On closer inspection I saw they were the folds of the curtains of a stage, where a girl in a purple leotard stood holding a trophy.

  “Can I see?” I asked, but she flipped the paper over, which was just as well.

  I didn’t want to talk about troupe or any of that, not if Stella was going to get all worked up about it again. On the other side of the same page, she’d drawn the words STELLA + TRIS inside a heart. I didn’t know where she got this stuff. I’d never even see her talk to Tris Culpberg.

  “Just doodling,” she said. “So what’s this about Naveen? You’re finally going to admit that you have a crush on him?”

  “No. For the gazillionth time. Why are you so set on me having a crush on somebody anyway?”

  “Because it’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  “According to . . .?” I looked around the room.

  “Never mind, Kate.” She started to doodle another heart. “Why is Naveen a genius?”

  So I explained about the fecal matter, and how I officially had a plan.

  Or at least I thought I did.

  Until Stella said, “I can’t believe I’m going to stoop to your level, because it’s totally disgusting, but how are you going to collect it? And where will you even put it?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” I said.

  I had to.

  6.

  Like most of the people on the planet, I liked Friday afternoons best of all.

  Fridays were when my dad would whistle at five o’clock and open a beer and sit out back and ask me about my day and talk about weekend plans.

  Fridays were when my mom cooked red sauce and meatballs.

  Fridays were free and fun.

  But when I came home, I didn’t see any sauce on the stove. My dad was in the living room, looking through old records and playing “Semi” at low volume.

  “Hey,” I said, plopping down on the couch.

  Angus came over to greet me so I petted him on his head.

  “Hey.” Dad turned an LP over to look at the other side.

  “Where’s Mom?” I listened as her sad, sad violin part kicked in while my dad sang the line, “I’m passing that old farm again / I carry the same load as the last time.”

  “Nap
ping room,” he said, and he sang along softly, “Don’t ever think of you anymore. My mind’s clear as the road.”

  I listened.

  I petted Angus some more.

  “Why did you write a song about a long-distance truck driver?” I asked.

  He shook his head and smiled. “I have no idea.” He was sorting records into crates and stopped for a second, then started shifting them again. “I guess I was writing about loneliness. Longing. Roads not taken. All that sort of stuff.”

  “But you were like twenty-five when you wrote it, weren’t you?”

  “Twenty-seven,” he said. “Yes. And that’s not too young to be lonely and longing for stuff.”

  Miss Emma was twenty-seven. I knew what she longed for—a boyfriend, an actual dancing gig—but my dad? It was hard to imagine. “What were you longing for?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked up and out the window. “Love? Life?”

  I saw Pants out the window, down by the tennis court, licking her front paws. Seeing her usually made me happy. But not today. “Do you still feel like that?”

  “Do I feel longing?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, I mean. I guess. Doesn’t everybody?”

  I was longing for a lot of things right then. Or maybe just one thing. Power. Control over my own destiny.

  My dad said, “But also, no, not really. I have you. I have your mother.”

  “So then what do you long for?”

  “I don’t know, Kate.” He stopped shifting records again. “Time? The past?”

  My mother’s violin solo kicked in. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that those notes, those words, had come out of the minds and bodies of the people who were now my parents. “How did you even know you could write songs?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” Dad said. “Until I did it.”

  “Hey.” Mom came up the stairs, her hair all flat from sleep. Angus went over to nudge her hello and she bent to pet him.

  She looked at me. “Kate, I need you to get started straightening up your room. The realtor wants minimal clutter.”

  Studying her—her droopy eyes, her puffy lips—I was worried she was getting sick, or already was. “Are we having spaghetti and meatballs?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they’re in the fridge,” she said, heading into the kitchen. “I made the sauce this morning.”

  She left the room and the song ended and I wasn’t sure why, but I felt relieved.

  I went upstairs and found a mostly empty box in my closet and started packing my glass animals. Starting with the elephant first felt right since it was the first one I’d bought. I’d always hated going to garage and barn sales with my parents, looking at all the old smelly stuff, until I’d found a small gray glass elephant a few years before. After that I hadn’t minded trolling through other people’s junk so much because I had a mission. It had been another few weeks before I found another glass animal, a flamingo. It was mostly clear but had enough pink glass blown inside that there was no mistaking it was a flamingo. Even though I’d never actually been on a plane before, it made me want to go to the nearest airport and buy a ticket to Florida or San Diego or wherever flamingos lived. Then came the frog and the poodle and the panda, and before long I had a whole mini mantel full of them.

  Packing them made me sort of sad, but I didn’t want somebody to knock one over and break it during the open house. Actually, I didn’t even want anyone to know they existed or to know anything about me. So after I was done, I started to stash anything that had anything to do with me under my bed.

  (Which first required me to go down to get the vacuum so I could get rid of some dead, dried-out stinkbugs under there. Gross!)

  I took photos of me and Stella off my bulletin board.

  I took the ballerina print over my bed off the wall.

  I even flipped over my bedspread, an elaborate paisley pattern that I adored, to the plain orange side on the reverse.

  When the room finally looked like I’d never lived there, I went downstairs.

  “That was fast.” My mom turned away from the stove, where she was stirring her sauce.

  I took an apple slice from a bowl she had put on the table and couldn’t think of the last time she’d actually gone to work. No wonder they couldn’t pay their bills. “Any conferences or networking things this weekend?”

  “Nope.” Still stirring her sauce.

  “Seems like things have been slow.” I bit the apple and it was sour. She put lemon juice on them to keep them from browning, which was great when you were mentally prepared. Otherwise, not so much. “Shouldn’t you be, like, asking for extra hours or something? Drumming up new business?”

  She set her spoon down then crossed over to the sink to wash her hands.

  “I need you to go out to the barn,” she said. “Make sure those kittens haven’t made a mess. And you have some old ballet shoes out there, I think. Just try to tidy.”

  I thought it was smart not to push on the topic of her not working very hard to save our house. I was going to take matters into my own hands, anyway.

  “No problem,” I said.

  When she left the room, I grabbed a Ziploc bag and a spatula, shoving the bags in my hoodie pocket and sticking the spatula in the back of my jeans, just in case I got lucky and could collect some fecal matter this afternoon.

  The barn was quiet and there were no signs of the kittens or any of their poop. They weren’t idiots; they didn’t poop where they slept. So I picked up my old ballet shoes and shoved them behind a few cans of paint on a shelf, and went out to walk around the yard. There had to be some fecal matter out there somewhere. But my first walk through the garden and along the stream turned up nothing. So I doubled back and crossed over one of the footbridges to the woods. Maybe there’d be some raccoon poop or deer droppings or anything.

  No luck.

  What had I become? Scouting out the yard for poop?

  I ended up on the old metal bench by the pear tree, watching the stream. It was really running fast, and I closed my eyes and listened and then opened them again and watched the way the light played on the water, making the stream seem like a living breathing thing, a part of me.

  A part of me worth fighting for.

  I had to figure out my plan for real.

  I needed exact logistics.

  I needed help.

  So I went inside and texted Stella and Naveen. I need help! Operation Save Big Red summit—10am Truxton Pond.

  My mother was vacuuming the wooden ceiling beams in the living room. She shouted over the loud hum, “I thought we’d go roller-skating! On Sunday! What do you think?” She used her foot to turn off the vacuum. “Your father said he’ll take Angus over to Joe’s and help out with some odd job. So it’ll be just us girls.”

  “Sounds fun.” Under normal circumstances it would be, particularly for my dad, who loved to help our elderly neighbor Joe with projects, just to hear crazy old stories. “Can I ask Stella?” I asked, because I always did.

  My mom looked at me for a second, turned the vacuum on, and said loudly, “Sure!”

  I got roped into some vacuuming and boxing up of clutter in the living room. Then I was sent out to the back porch to stash random stuff like old candles and bug spray and gardening gloves. A slight breeze blew while I collected everything and my mother’s wind chimes rang out a random, joyous melody that made me think of churches and Christmas. They were part metal and part wood with a green stone of some kind hanging from the main string. My dad had given them to my mom for her birthday a bunch of years ago, and I’d seen her blow gently on them before sitting down with her iced coffee or tea a million times. On cloudy days the green of the pendant looked like a deep emerald but on sunny days like this one, it lit up like a green sun in some faraway galaxy. Looking at it now made my heart hurt.

  Before my mother could come up with any more jobs for me, I went downstairs and started a diorama of my bedroom. I wanted to capture it as it l
ooked before I’d stripped it of all personality—just in case I never had the chance to put my stuff back for real.

  I couldn’t make glass animals small enough so I just made a little mantel and bed. I colored a braided rug and tried to make Angus, this time out of cotton balls and some beige yarn. I put him at the foot of the bed and the whole thing looked so cozy that I wanted to just climb in.

  When I was done, I headed for the stairs, but I heard my parents talking. My dad was saying, “We’ve been through difficult things before.” And my mom said, “This feels different. I feel different, like I can’t handle it.”

  I backed away and just stood there, outside the napping room.

  Dad said, “Think you need to talk to someone?”

  Mom said, “I don’t know.”

  It wasn’t normal. To have a mother who napped so much.

  My dad called me up for dinner a few minutes later. “It’s time for ze Italian meat-a-balz.”

  7.

  Naveen was lying on brown grass that had just started to turn green, staring up at the sky with his knees jutting up into the air, one leg crossed over the other, when I arrived at Truxton Pond on Saturday morning. I had a basket full of supplies for my operation.

  “Do I need to call an ambulance?” I asked.

  “Huh?” Naveen’s bike lay beside him.

  I studied him. “Did you fall or get hit by a car or something?”

  “Nah.” He opened his eyes, sat up. “Timed my ride, though, to see how fast I could get here. Catching my breath.”

  I laid my own bike down next to his—careful that my supplies stayed in the basket—and took a seat beside him. When we were younger we’d often end up here—me, Naveen, Stella—just talking about nothing and picking grass to braid into shapes or studying caterpillars we’d lure onto sticks. Summers were changing, though. I already knew Naveen was doing a science camp and a Lego camp this year and I’d probably never see him at the pond, even if I wasn’t already living somewhere else, which I probably would be. And there was talk of Stella going back to horse camp and starting to really get into dressage, which I pretended I thought was awesome but actually thought was kind of silly. What was the point of making horses do all that fancy footwork? Though the camp would be a good place to get my hands on some fecal matter.